Colonial America's early history tells the story of the--at first gradual, and, finally, as Europe burst figurative banks, the enormous wave of "people from over the sea" washed into what is today the U.S.
I first became of aware of this history of colonization when I was seven, after a move from Ohio to New York State. Mother relished history and so when she and my father house-hunted, she wanted to find as old a house as she could. I don't think Dad got much say in this, because he was all for "modern" anytime he could get it. Having been a teen through the Depression era had convinced him that electric lights, a furnace and flushing toilets were all desirable things.
The house we moved into provided all that, although it had been originally built, near as anybody knew, a decade or so before 1800, probably during the time when newly independent Americans were spilling onto lands that had once belonged to the local and now dispossessed Iroquoian tribes. Our house was small, a style that today is commonly called "Cape Cod" but it also had Dutch doors equipped with heavy iron hinges and which were locked with a bar. As this was near the Mohawk Valley, that the builders were Dutch and had been there before the War of Independence did not seem improbable. There was even a story about Indian attacks during the early days of the house, one which the restless spirits which we encountered almost as we took up residence did nothing to disprove.
I recently took a New England trip to see an old friend and we decided to go a few miles north to Deerfield, to visit the National Historical site there. When I first saw those carefully preserved Georgian era Colonial houses along the main street, it seemed to me that this would be just another Tory New England town, one which was once filled with dour Calvinist merchants and landlords. I soon learned that during the Revolution, this town had remained loyal to the Crown.
There were many reasons for this, one of which was that the original terms of the Massachusetts Bay colony. That stipulated that these Dissenters, freshly kicked out of England, could run the territory as a kind of fundamentalist kingdom, as long as they remained loyal and sent plenty of young men into the King's army whenever called upon to do so. In this Puritan theocracy, citizens could be whipped (15-20 lashes!) and fined for not only more obvious Puritan sins like adultery and/or drunkenness, but for not attending the obligatory, (and endless) Sunday services. In many ways, however, in this period, local government was had many admirable qualities. The towns were administered by Selectmen, and legislation was by consensus instead of majority rule.
The minister's house, one of the largest in Deerfield, built for him by his flock.
When white immigrants first explored that area, they found an Algonquian tribe living in a stockaded town, while farming the rich bottom land around the Connecticut River. These were the Pocumtucks, and they lived (mostly) in harmony with their Algonquian relatives. At this time, European diseases, smallpox and measles, were already killing many Indians, while fighting over control over the fur trade increased every year, because those fabulous goodies like metal farming tools and cook pots, guns and wool blankets, etc. brought by European traders had opened a new world to a stone-age people. By the 1630's, these foreign trade goods were becoming indispensable.
The Iroquois, fierce warriors, were "the enemy" for both the Algonquian tribes and the new immigrants alike. Their confederacy (Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida,) occupied New York State, but their war- path reach extended right across the Connecticut Valley and into Abenaki lands as distant as Maine. The Iroquois were always in the middle of any land or trade agreement, whether you were Algonquian, Dutch, French or English. They made war frequently in order to take captives, preferring to take children who could be assimilated easily. European or Indian, at this time you had to take the mighty Iroquois into consideration.
For a time, the Pocumtucks were able to deal with the whites, who were, initially, seen as just another "tribe" looking for land. Eventually, however, the Pocumtuck angered the Mohawks by killing one of their chiefs. After one swift punitive strike from the Hudson Valley, the Pocumtuck and their town by the river were no more.
It did not take long for the land to be resettled, this time by an English plantation. Good farmland could not long be ignored by the settlers, but the site seemed cursed. Settlers were just eking out a living when King's Philip's War erupted. This conflict would be the last stand of the eastern Algonquian tribes against an overwhelming white incursion.
An attempted retreat by the people of Pocumtuck, carrying away their newly harvested corn, ended in a massacre at a place now called "Bloody Brook," and made infamous by Puritan writers. Poor preparation by the militia contributed greatly to the disaster. The town of Pocumtuck hadn't even bothered to build a stockade, so the town was easily destroyed. During this war, one hundred and forty-five men were killed in the northern part of the valley, most of them settlers. Four other towns in the Connecticut Valley were also completely destroyed. The remaining five towns had all been attacked and raided for their corn and cattle. It must have been a grim winter, with families broken and famine on the horizon.
It would take more than a decade, but the old Pocumtuck land would be resettled, this time called "Deerfield." The new settlers built a stockade. Farmers came to land, younger sons from towns like Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield and Springfield, all places south along the Connecticut River.
Time would pass while the town grew again, but peace broke down easily. There were always inter-tribal wars as well as wars that originated in Europe to cause Indian raids, rustling and murder among the outlying farms. In the early 1700's, what is known as Queen Anne's War* broke out. The French joined forces with the Caughnawaga and Mohawk, raiding into northern New York and down into New England, even into Halifax near Boston. The Connecticut Valley became a battlefield again.
Deerfield begged for help with troops and arms, and a little arrived in late 1703. Deep in winter of 1704, a group of two to three hundred men on snowshoes came south from Montreal. Among them were French soldiers, coureurs de bois, and Indians, many of these refugees from King's Philips' War, the one that had broken the New England tribes.
Drifts of snow helped the invaders scale the stockade while the watch overslept. Soon "they were fireing houses, killing all they could that made any resistance, also killing livestock." The Reverend John Williams who lived through a subsequent captivity to tell the tale said: "by their violent endeavors ... broke open doors and windows, with axes and hatchets..." His pistol misfired and he was quickly captured and bound. He watched the murder his youngest two children, a toddler and a six week old baby, as well as the children's black nurse. He and his wife (who would be killed at the start of their march) and five children were carried into captivity. On the terrible winter march north, Williams would watch nine more people die--the young and the old.
The sack of Deerfield had ended when men from Hadley and Hatfield arrived on the scene. Early on in the fight, a young man, John Sheldon, after binding his feet with strips of his nightshirt, had managed to struggle almost naked through deep snow for many miles in order to give the alarm.
Of the 291 people who had gone to sleep in Deerfield that fatal night, only 133 remained alive the following day. Beyond the 109 people captured, 44 residents of Deerfield had been killed--ten men, 9 women and 25 small children. Seventeen of forty-one houses were destroyed. Reverend Williams would survive his captivity and eventually redeem four of his five children.*
Driving through bustling Connecticut and into Massachusetts today, I can barely imagine this totally urbanized/suburbanized landscape as a frontier, one every bit as wild and dangerous as our more well-known "wild west." The early period of colonization was complex, filled with wars between Indians as well as wars between various groups of colonists as well as the more often remembered wars between Indians and Europeans.
At the end of the school day, my friend and I paused in our visit to watch Deerfield's streets fill with BMW's and Mercedes as parents arrived to retrieve their children from the exclusive private prep school that shares grounds with the historical site. It was hard, watching that scene, to remember what a hard-scrabble, cold, tough, dangerous place the early New England world truly was.
~~Juliet Waldron
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* The North American part of the European War of the Spanish Succession. .
* You can read about it in The Unredeemed Captive. Eunice, the youngest survivor of the Williams children, would become Catholic and marry an Indian. Reverend John Williams himself wrote the first text of the tale, the one upon which modern books on the subject are based.
